欧宝娱乐

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Imagine you are walking down a leafy path鈥he sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny鈥econds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly鈥�”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else鈥檚 shoes and understand the other鈥檚 different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . .”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Art is as useful as bread.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.”
― azar nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I'm a perfectly equipped failure.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.”
― azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else鈥檚 dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn, and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the window-panes to prevent the implosion of shattered glass told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted across the sky.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space - not just space but a necessity - for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to reach and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. There was where Austen's danger lay.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement鈥攆or she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“..."readers were born free and ought to remain free.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality.... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.... If we have learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books